Many companies are adopting the use of XML (extensible Markup Language) for a variety of applications, such as, database information, etc. XML is a well formed language and is a tree structure style of database. Currently, many companies have access to and can obtain relational database (RDB) systems. Relational databases are well known, have good support, and a wide variety of available tools. For example, most RDB installations have provisions for system backup, maintenance, query language interfaces, etc. The maturity of these tools makes the RDB a robust and stable platform. However, a RDB is a very structured database. As such, it is difficult to map other database structures to the RDB model. For example, tree structured databases are not easily and/or efficiently mapped to the traditional RDB column structure. This problem becomes apparent when trying to use XML on a RDB.